Set in the American South, this is the story of a group of people who appear to have little in common except they are all hopelessly lonely. A young girl, a drunken socialist and a black doctor are drawn to a gentle, sympathetic deaf mute, John Singer, whose presence changes their lives.
Hilariously picaresque, epic in scope, alive with the poetry and vigor of the American people, Mark Twain's story about a young boy and his journey down the Mississippi was the first great novel to speak in a truly American voice. Influencing subsequent generations of writers -- from Sherwood Anderson to Twain's fellow Missourian, T.S. Eliot, from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner to J.D. Salinger -- Huckleberry Finn , like the river which flows through its pages, is one of the great sources which nourished and still nourishes the literature of America.
Quasimodo, a gentle and kind hunchback who lives an isolated life in a cathedral in Paris, rescues the beautiful Esmeralda from being hanged for a crime she did not commit
Hesse's novel of two medieval men, one quietly content with his religion and monastic life, the other in fervent search of more worldly salvation. This conflict between flesh and spirit, between emotional and contemplative man, was a life study for Hesse. It is a theme that transcends all time. The Hesse Phenomenon has turned into a vogue, the vogue into a torrent . . . He has appealed both to . . . an underground and to an establishment . . . and to the disenchanted young sharing his contempt for our industrial civilization. -- The New York Times Book Review
Published in 1919, Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a work in which he achieved the goal to which he believed all true writers should aspire: to see and feel "all of life within." In a perfectly imagined world, an archetypal small American town, he reveals the hidden passions that turn ordinary lives into unforgettable ones. Unified by the recurring presence of young George Willard, and played out against the backdrop of Winesburg, Anderson's loosely connected chapters, or stories, coalesce into a powerful novel. In such tales as "Hands," the portrayal of a rural berry picker still haunted by the accusations of homosexuality that ended his teaching career, Anderson's vision is as acute today as it was over eighty-five years ago. His intuitive ability to home in on examples of timeless, human conflicts--a workingman deciding if he should marry the woman who is to bear his child, an unhappy housewife who seeks love from the town's doctor, an unmarried high school teacher sexually attracted to a pupil--makes this book not only immensely readable but also deeply meaningful. An important influence on Faulkner, Hemingway, and others who were drawn to Anderson's innovative format and psychological insights, Winesburg, Ohio deserves a place among the front ranks of our nation's finest literary achievements.
Edgar Allan Poe remains the unsurpassed master of works of mystery and madness in this outstanding collection of Poe's prose and poetry are sixteen of his finest tales, including "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "William Wilson," "The Black Cat," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "Eleonora". Here too is a major selection of what Poe characterized as the passion of his life, his poems - "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," Ulalume," "Lenore," "The Bells," and more, plus his glorious prose poem "Silence - A Fable" and only full-length novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym .
To Build A Fire and Other Stories is the most comprehensive and wide-ranging collection of Jack London's short stories available in paperback. This superb volume brings together twenty-five of London's finest, including a dozen of his great Klondike stories, vivid tales of the Far North were rugged individuals, such as the Malemute Kid face the violence of man and nature during the Gold Rush Days. Also included are short masterpieces from his later writing, plus six stories unavailable in any other paperback edition. Here, along with London's famous wilderness adventures and fireband desperadoes, are portraits of the working man, the immigrant, and the exotic outcast: characters representing the entire span of the author's prolific imaginative career, in tales that have been acclaimed throughout the world as some of the most thrilling short stories ever written.
Merry Christmas, everyone! 'Bah!' said Scrooge. 'Humbug!' With those famous words unfolds a tale that renews the joy and caring that are Christmas. Whether we read it aloud with our family and friends or open the pages on a chill winter evening to savor the story in solitude, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is a very special holiday experience. It is the one book that every year will warm our hearts with favorite memories of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future--and will remind us with laughter and tears that the true Christmas spirit comes from giving with love. With a heartwarming account of Dickens' first reading of the Carol, and a biographical sketch.
Pericles The first of Shakespeare's late romances moves spectacularly from one dramatic period to another as the hero, Pericles, sails off to adventure and love, and experiences what for him is a miracle.
Cymbeline A favorite romantic drama, this play of a wife unjustly accused of faithlessness moves from a world of intrigue and slander to one of reconciliation and forgiveness, and contains two of Shakespeare's most poignantly beautiful songs.
The Winter's Tale From a darkly melodramatic beginning to a joyous pastoral ending, this romance of a jealous king and his long-suffering queen is superb entertainment, with revelations, plot twists, and a final compelling theatrical moment of discovery.
The Tempest This tale of the exiled Duke of Milan, marooned on an enchanted island, is so richly filled with music and magic, romance and comedy, that its theme of love and reconciliation offers a splendid feast for the senses and the heart.
With their call for "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!", for self-honesty, and for harmony with nature, the writings of Henry David Thoreau are perhaps the most influential philosophical works in all American literature. The selections in this volume represent Thoreau at his best. Included in their entirety are Walden , his indisputable masterpiece, and his two great arguments for nonconformity, Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principle . A lifetime of brilliant observation of nature--and of himself--is recorded in selections from A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod, The Maine Woods and The Journal .
Translated and with an introduction by Jack Zipes A collection of twenty-two fairy tales by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, most translated into English for the first time, show the influence of German Romanticism, psychoanalysis, and Eastern religion on his development as an author. Praise for The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse Sometimes lush and lyrical, sometimes in the simple language of the parable, these tales elaborate Hesse's concerns with mortality, the unity of life and the isolation of the artist. . . . Quirky and evocative, Hesse's fairy tales stand alone, but also amplify the ideas and utopian longings of such counterculture avatars as Siddhartha and Steppenwolf. -- Publishers Weekly Hesse unerringly creates the feel of a fairy tale. . . . Lay readers will enjoy this as much as literary specialists. -- Library Journal
George Bernard Shaw was the greatest British dramatist after Shakespeare, a satirist equal to Jonathan Swift, and a playwright whose most profound gift was his ability to make audiences think by provoking them to laughter. In one of his best-loved plays, Pygmalion, which later became the basis for the musical My Fair Lady, Shaw compels the audience to see the utter absurdity and hypocrisy of class distinction when Professor Henry Higgins wagers that he can transform a common flower girl into a lady--and then pass her off as a duchess--simply by changing her speech and manners. In Major Barbara Shaw spins out the drama of an eccentric millionaire, a romantic poet, and a misguided savior of souls, Major Barbara herself, in a topsy-turvy masterpiece of sophisticated banter and urbane humor. His brilliant dialogue, combined with his use of paradox and socialist theory, never fails to tickle, entertain--and challenge.
These four landmark novels of nineteenth-century American literature have gained a permanent place in our culture as great classics. They are not only part of our national heritage, but masterpieces of world literature whose deep and lasting influence is felt to this day. The Scarlet Letter vividly records America's moral and historical roots in Puritan New England and masterfully re-creates a society's preoccupation with sin, guilt, and pride. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn carries readers along on Huck's unforgettable journey down the Mississippi in America's foremost comic epic--the first great novel in a truly American voice. The Red Badge of Courage re-creates the brutal reality of war and its psychological impact on a young Civil War soldier in one of the most moving and widely read American novels. Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories joins the world's great tragic literature as a doomed seaman becomes the innocent victim of a clash between social authority and individual freedom.
This essential one-volume collection brings together some of the most influential and significant works by African-American writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Included herein are such classics as Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , An American Slave (1845) and excerpts from W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861), Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901), and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). Whether read as records of African-American history, autobiography, or literature, these invaluable texts stand as timeless monuments to the courage, intellect, and dignity of those for whom writing itself was an act of rebellion--and whose voices and experiences would have otherwise been silenced forever. Edited with an introduction by Anthony Appiah, who explains the distinctive American literary and cultural context of the time, this edition of Early African-American Classics remains the standard by which all similar collections will inevitably be compared.
Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking, controversial, and powerful work -- exposing the attitudes of white nineteenth-century society toward "the peculiar institution" and documenting, in heartrending detail, the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families "sold down the river." An immediate international sensation, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the first year, was translated into thirty-seven languages, and has never gone out of print: its political impact was immense, its emotional influence immeasurable.
In 1880 Dostoevsky completed The Brothers Karamazov , the literary effort for which he had been preparing all his life. Compelling, profound, complex, it is the story of a patricide and of the four sons who each had a motive for murder: Dmitry, the sensualist, Ivan, the intellectual; Alyosha, the mystic; and twisted, cunning Smerdyakov, the bastard child. Frequently lurid, nightmarish, always brilliant, the novel plunges the reader into a sordid love triangle, a pathological obsession, and a gripping courtroom drama. But throughout the whole, Dostoevsky searhes for the truth--about man, about life, about the existence of God. A terrifying answer to man's eternal questions, this monumental work remains the crowning achievement of perhaps the finest novelist of all time.
An American frigate, tracking down a ship-sinking monster, faces not a living creature but an incredible invention -- a fantastic submarine commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo. Suddenly a devastating explosion leaves just three survivors, who find themselves prisoners inside Nemo's death ship on an underwater odyssey around the world from the pearl-laden waters of Ceylon to the icy dangers of the South Pole . . .as Captain Nemo, one of the greatest villians ever created, takes his revenge on all society.
More than a marvelously thrilling drama, this classic novel, written in 1870, foretells with uncanny accuracy the inventions and advanced technology of the twentieth century and has become a literary stepping-stone for generations of science fiction writers.
Known primarily for her classic and haunting story "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an enormously influential American feminist and sociologist. Her early-twentieth-century writings continue to inspire writers and activists today. This collection includes selections from both her fiction and nonfiction work.
In addition to the title story, there are seven short stories collected here that combine humor, anger, and startling vision to suggest how women's "place" in society should be changed to benefit all. The nonfiction selections are from Gilman's The Man-Made World: Our Androcentric Culture and her masterpiece, Women And Economics, which was translated into seven languages and established her international reputation as a theorist.
Also included in a delightful excerpt from Gilman's utopian novel, Herland, an acidly funny tale about three American male explorers who stumble into an all-female society and begin their odyssey by insisting, "This is a civilized country . . . there must be men." Gilman's analyses of economic and women's issues are as incisive and relevant today as they were upon their original publication. This volume is an unprecedented opportunity to rediscover a powerful American writer.
My intention is to portray a truly beautiful soul. --Dostoevsky
Despite the harsh circumstances besetting his own life--abject poverty, incessant gambling, the death of his youngest child--Dostoevsky produced a second masterpiece, The Idiot, after completing Crime and Punishment. In it, a saintly man, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power, and sexual conquest than with the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections.
Extortion, scandal, and murder follow, testing Myshkins moral feelings, as Dostoevsky searches through the wreckage left by human misery to find man in man. The Idiot is a quintessentially Russian novel, one that penetrates the complex psyche of the Russian people. They call me a psychologist, wrote Dostoevsky. That is not true. Im only a realist in the higher sense; that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul.
